One everyday garment came last for both perceived intelligence and trustworthiness.
Track pants, also known as tracksuit bottoms, receive the lower ratings for perceived intelligence compared with blouses, ordinary trousers or long skirts in a study of women’s clothing.
Of the six types of clothing the researchers compared, track pants also received the lowest average ratings for trustworthiness.
Blouses and hemlines
Blouses topped the rankings for intelligence and trustworthiness but scored near the bottom for confidence.
Short skirts showed almost the reverse pattern, scoring near the top for confidence and lower than long skirts on both intelligence and trustworthiness.
Short skirts also gave the strongest impression of sexual interest, showing how much people can read into a hemline.
Long skirts fell between short skirts and blouses on confidence, while ordinary trousers scored higher than tracksuit bottoms on both intelligence and trustworthiness.
What looks cheerful?
Onesies gave the strongest impression of happiness and scored about as high as short skirts for confidence.
White clothes suggested a happier wearer than grey clothes did, with black clothes coming last.
These examples show how the impression changes with the question being asked: a blouse came out ahead for intelligence, while a onesie came out ahead for happiness.
Who is doing the judging?
The researchers began by asking about 200 people what they thought clothes could tell them about someone and comparing their answers with traits examined in previous research.
They then gathered ratings on 5,000 photographs from online shops, covering five kinds of impressions: intelligence, confidence, trustworthiness, happiness and sexual interest.
Participants formed these impressions from photographs of the garments alone, without seeing anyone wearing them.
The results showed that who was doing the judging explained more of the variation in ratings than which garment they saw.
For example, one person might associate tracksuit bottoms with training for a race, while another might picture someone spending a Sunday on the sofa.
The researchers draw a parallel between judging people by their clothes and judging them by their faces:
“That is, much like inferences from faces, the inferred attributes often lie in the eye of the beholder.”
Related
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The study was published in the Journal of Computational Social Science (Rosenbusch et al., 2021).
